Why Pay For Pre-Foreclosure Lists?

There are hundreds if not thousands of free pre-foreclosure lists, so why bother to pay for pre foreclosure lists that provide the same information? Believe it or not it may actually save you money to pay to belong to a website that allows you to view pre-foreclosure lists, rather than to use the free sites. The following reasons are the key factors in why paid pre foreclosure lists are ideally suited to serious investors.

Time IS Money

In the investment and real estate world this is absolutely true. The time that it takes to browse through the hundreds of thousands of pre foreclosure lists on the internet is time that you could be spending contacting home owners, surveying areas and neighborhoods and putting together offers and information. The more serious of an investor you are the more critical time is when you are juggling multiple deals at the same time. Using free pre foreclosure lists may be cost saving money wise, but if you factor in your hourly rate you will definitely be losing money each minute you spend at your computer looking through lists that might not have one property of interest to you.


Research and Tracking

While most of the free lists will provide information on the physical address of the property, many don't include pictures, specific information on the property, comparable sales figures and even the homeowner and lender contact information. If you don't have this information, you will again need to take your own time or more likely hire someone else to do this research for you.

The Early Bird Gets The Worm

When pre-foreclosure properties are put on lists, there is a huge interest in the property generated by those using the lists. The faster that you can contact the homeowner and the lender the faster you can present the bid on the property for the sale. If you can directly access all the information that you need on the paid site, you are far ahead of the group of investors that is trying to save a few dollars by doing the research on their own.

Finding Just What You Want

The paid pre foreclosure lists all offer the option of notifying you when a property matching your search criteria is placed on the list. This can help you in saving both time and energy as you can really fine tune the search criteria based on price, age of the home, market value, location and other specific criteria.

Avoid Junk Mail

Free sites are paid for by advertisers; so you will have to provide some type of email address to access the site. Once you do that you are giving permission for advertisers to contact you in exchange for the use of the free listings. Paid sites don't have this same need for income from advertisers, so you will typically avoid all the junk mail associated with using the free sites.